Now well into my ninth decade, I have witnessed more than one-third of our nation’s history. My earliest political memory is that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice transmitted through my parents’ console radio. Actuarial tables indicate my final political recollections may revolve around two extremely negative, near-term events: the reelection of Donald J. Trump or the chaos that will follow in the wake of his defeat.
I hope to beat the actuarial odds for at least another five or 10 years. As fully as I once wanted to witness the termination of the Nixon era, I now want to witness the end of Trumpism. I fear, however, that the two likely outcomes of the 2024 presidential election will have extraordinarily negative consequences — and I fully realize that one of those negative outcomes is inevitable. Trumpism will likely persist as a brutalizing force in American politics for at least another decade.
I believe Utah’s Republican Sen. Mitt Romney did all within his power to ensure Trump would not be reelected and that the Jan. 6, 2021 disruption of the rule of law would not recur. In response to his defense of the U.S. Constitution, Romney was booed, accused of being a deep-state operative and narrowly escaped censure during the 2021 Utah State Republican Convention. His GOP senate colleagues ostracized him. He received credible threats from Trump’s loyalists — threats so credible that he spent $5,000 per day on private security for himself and his family.
Romney, like other courageous GOP officeholders, was all but purged from his party’s ranks. Although he will not publicly support Vice President Kamala Harris, Romney remains steadfast in his opposition to Trump’s reelection.
Romney’s descent from his party’s 2012 presidential candidate to its 2021 “RINO-traitor” indicates character counts for little within today’s GOP. This discounting of character dates from 1978, when Newt Gingrich addressed a group of college Republicans. His presentation can be summarized in six points: Be nasty. Be a power-politics warrior. Be a politician, not a statesman. Don’t educate voters, manipulate them. Winning is everything. Trust no one.
Gingrich’s “reform” of the GOP paved the way for the party’s takeover by Trump and the members of his personality cult. For the past eight years, Trump and his MAGA crowds have waged an unprecedented attack on the twin-pillars of our republic: truth-telling and civic virtue.
The consequences: Never before has a former president who is as flawed a candidate as Trump — an individual some have called cognitively challenged and psychologically unstable and who believes in nothing other than himself, his appetites, his instincts and his autocratic ambitions — evidenced, according to major polls, a 50% chance of reelection.
Never before has such an individual commandeered a major American political party, garnered the loyalty of its most radical and/or opportunistic power-players, and forced its moderates to choose between cowardly silence or the termination of their political careers.
Never before could such an individual, if reelected, stand so thoroughly empowered to reject experienced advisors who are faithful to the Constitution — reject “the adults in the room” who might rein in his most authoritarian impulses — and instead appoint loyalists who will do his bidding. In addition those loyalists will enact the fusion of executive-branch dominance, faux-libertarianism and Christian nationalism mapped out in Project 2025.
Never before would such an individual, if reelected, be so thoroughly insulated against criminal indictment and prosecution — all due to the wide-ranging and much criticized presidential-immunity decision rendered by six conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Extreme countermeasures are already in place if Trump loses. His allies are flooding the courts with suits that will facilitate challenges to election results. He and many of his congressional supporters continue to promulgate Trump’s unsubstantiated big lie that the 2020 election involved a big steal on the part of Democrats. Trump has for months repeated his claim that he can lose only if the election is once again stolen. Procedures are likely being readied to challenge the legitimacy of the Electoral College vote.
American democracy will be most readily preserved and our nation’s conservative movement salvaged only if Trump, his strident supporters and his silent enablers are decisively defeated at the ballot box. There is a 50% chance that Trump will be vanquished at the polls. Unfortunately, most red-state Republican incumbents are likely to be reelected.
Our nation is more polarized now than at any other time within my memory. The internal threat to democracy is grave. Despite evidence to the contrary, I continue to embrace the optimism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Our nation’s constitutional order, together with the quest for a more inclusive and just society, will live on — if persons of goodwill promote and support them.
Andrew Bjelland
Andrew Bjelland, PhD, is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Seattle University. He taught political philosophy, jurisprudence, medical ethics and logic, and he held the Pigott-McCone Chair in Humanities. He resides in Salt Lake City.
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